Contact Information

Work Images

Kyle Steinfeld

Assistant Professor of Architecture

Education

Masters of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2004

Bachelors of Design in Architecture, University of Florida 1999

Philosophy Statement

The aim of my research and creative work is to illuminate the dynamic relationship between the creative practice of design and computational design methods, enabling a more inventive, informed, responsive, and responsible practice of architecture. Too often in the relatively young subject area of Design Computation, the influence of software tools on the creative practice of design is either vastly over- or under-stated, with one of these actors characterized as a direct determinant of the other. My work seeks to demonstrate that while new technologies of design do not directly determine social relationships, they are among the network of actors – designers and specialists, software and users, data and drawings – that compete to shape the diffusion of design authorship and the social distribution of design work. More than ever, as the contexts relevant to design (social, environmental, phenomenal) are understood to operate at scales for which traditional design methods struggle to account, the conditions that give shape to an architectural intervention are apprehended through data and are mediated by software. A clear-eyed understanding of the nature of this mediation enables both a critical reading of data and a creative engagement with software, which is increasingly a prerequisite for an informed and responsible practice of architecture.

Biography

Kyle Steinfeld, Assistant Professor specializing in digital design technologies, is one author of the forthcoming “Geometric Computation: A Field Guide for Architects”, a foundational text that demystifies computational geometry for an audience of architecture students and design professionals. Guided by an idea of “practical computation”, a foundations-first, visually-rich, and problem-centered approach to the subject, this work is conceived of as a guidebook to accompany architectural designers as they tackle projects that benefit from the critical application of computation. Kyle is also the the creator of Decod.es, a platform-agnostic geometry library intended to promote computational literacy in creative design. He has been the recipient of a number of fellowships for research in design technology, most recently serving as an IDEA fellow at Autodesk in 2014 and as a Hellman Fellow in 2012. His broad research interests include collaborative design technology platforms, design computation pedagogy, and bioclimatic design visualization. Professionally, he has worked with and consulted for a number of firms, including SOM, Acconci Studio, KPF, Howler/Yoon, and Diller+Scofidio. He teaches design studios, core courses in representation, and advanced seminars in digital modeling and visualization. He holds a Masters of Architecture from MIT and a Bachelor's Degree in Design from the University of Florida.

Kyle Steinfeld, Levon Fox, and Alex Spatzier. “The Data Made Me Do It: Direct, Deferred, and Dissolved Authorship and the Architecture of the Crowd (Forthcoming).” In Paradigms in Computing: Making, Machines, and Models for Design Agency in Architecture, edited by David Gerber and Mariana Ibanez. Actar, 2014.

Steinfeld, Kyle. “Data Agency.” In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), edited by David Gerber, Alvin Huang, and Jose Sanchez. Los Angeles: Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, 2014.

Steinfeld, Kyle, and Carlos Sandoval. “Imperative, Functional, Object-Oriented: An Alternative Ontology of Programmatic Paradigms for Design.” In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). Los Angeles: Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, 2014.